Young Ted Miliband would take Stears to a book shop to show him books by his dad – the Marxist intellectual Ralph Miliband, in whose politics the right think they will find their best attack lines: that the younger Miliband is a secret sympathiser to his dad's long-incubated Marxist ideas.

It quoted a Libyan rebel sympathiser living abroad but in daily contact with activists in the capital as saying: "There have been attacks by Tripoli people and a lot of people have been killed on the army side."